Álvaro Mutis

Vol. 1: La nieve del almirante (1986), Ilona llega con la lluvia (1988), Un bel morir (1988), La última escala del Tramp Steamer (1988)

Maqroll the Gaviero (the Lookout) is one of the most alluring and memorable characters in the fiction of the last twenty-five years. His extravagant and hopeless undertakings, his brushes with the law and scrapes with death, and his enduring friendships and unlooked-for love affairs make him a Don Quixote for our day, driven from one place to another by a restless and irregular quest for the absolute.

Álvaro Mutis's seven dazzling chronicles of the adventures and misadventures of Maqroll have won him numerous honors and a passionately devoted readership throughout the world. 

"And if you want to change your life - for the better - and have never read the Colombian novelist Alvaro Mutis, you owe it to yourself to get acquainted with The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. A collection of seven novellas that can be read at a run or singly, it features the greatest rainbow-chaser since Quixote, but a lot sexier and ravenous for both learning and love, not to mention fantastical, doomed schemes to make a pile of loot." Simon Schama, The Guardian

"..a newborn classic, a latter-day "Don Quixote" whose central persona, both amusingly shadowy and adamantly consistent, moves around the globe somewhat as the Knight of the Mournful Countenance traversed the plains of Spain." John Updike, The New Yorker, January 13, 2003

“Though each of these entertaining and elegant novellas can stand on its own, the cumulative effect is of an epic novel. Mutis is a writer of the first order. I admire his work very much and can only encourage others to read him.” Oscar Hijuelos

“Recalls Joseph Conrad. And one can think of Maqroll himself not only as a Byronic figure but also a male counterpart of Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna; both are spellbinding storytellers.” Boston Globe

“Three elegant, linked novellas fusing the dream-like imagery of Gabriel García Márquez with the dark undercurrents of Joseph Conrad.” San Diego Union Tribune

“Mutis invents Maqroll el Gaviero like García Márquez invents Macondo, Onetti Santa María, Rulfo Comala. Maqroll is also a region of the imaginary, though created through a skillful assembly of small and large realities.” Mario Benedetti

'Álvaro Mutis y la nave que nos lleva', José Manuel Fajardo, Zenda, 12/04/2017